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I give you the 2012 time capsule just placed in a wall of the Saskatchewan legislature in Regina on Thursday. It includes objects that reflect the prairie bacchanalia that is modern Saskatchewan.

Carpet swatches from the legislative chamber. An iPad manual. (Not an iPad. Just the manual.) A photo of Premier Brad Wall. A list of 2012 curling champions. Barley seeds. Chickpea seeds. Other seeds. A photo of the legislature’s cafeteria’s price list. A report from the Saskatchewan Provincial Constituency Boundaries Commission. A photo of an owl. A description of the previous time capsule from 1909, which appears to consist of a very thin phonebook.

“I hope these items convey to those 100 years hence the optimism and the energy, the vibrancy that is Saskatchewan today,” said Premier Brad Wall. I hope they don’t, sir.

Wall then sealed the wall in which the capsule was carefully placed with instructions that it not be opened for 100 years, which it won’t unless the cafeteria runs out of grains or someone spills espresso on the new carpeting and has an idea for a quick fix.

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Time capsules are intended to be a sample of current times — or what passes for them in Saskatchewan. I am speechless. It isn’t that I think the province could have offered hardwood flooring — no one does carpets any more — but why should a time capsule contain flooring in the first place?

Fine, Roman mosaic flooring was very nice. But wouldn’t an area rug by local Regina craftspeople have been more appropriate? It would really pull the room together.

Anthropologists of the future, having opened other time capsules, will puzzle over the handful of dust that is the Saskatchewan one, which defeats the point. They’re supposed to explain, not confuse. They’re supposed to distill the essence of a civilization in objects.

The menu is oblong, as are the photos, the Legislative Building employees’ list, and the beaded moose hide leather business card holder. The province is oblong. So perhaps these inert things are totemic, future scientists will hazard.

So why is there no Corner Gas, found in every other non-oblong province? Perhaps TV, much less digitization, had not yet come to this flat place. Perhaps they were terribly advanced, scientists will suggest, and could play it on a pamphlet — this iPad “manual” — while other less developed cultures had to use a screen machine with power that leaked out of little triple-hole spots cut into “walls” named after the Saskatchewan god, Lord Wall.

Perhaps Saskatchewan, a famously comic mischievous province, set out to confuse the people of the future with a collection of junk they picked up at NiftyGifty, opposite the legislature. What else explains “pewter Legislative Building ornament” included in the capsule?

Future scientists will guess that sacred pewter, made of compressed potash and ambergris, was dug from as-yet undiscovered mines and crafted into idols worn around the neck to ward off ill fortune.

In other words, the capsule actually does contain the real Saskatchewan, not the place they hoped for but the one they lived in. I suspect this is true. That would explain why there’s no reference to Saskatchewan’s greatest product, Joni Mitchell. Her omission translates into the classic Canadian remark: who does she think she is?

Ontario’s time capsule would have to include a vial of an ancient drug known as hash oil accompanied by a “safety pin,” a “G-20” leather bag containing police name tags and a Ford brother perfectly preserved in an airless bog.

Alberta’s time capsule would be a biscuit tin filled with bitumen on which is scratched, “It’s oil, not tar. Got that?”

But they wouldn’t be. They’d be filled with soporifics, as Saskatchewan’s is.

Time capsules should be marvels, nuggets from life as it was actually lived: ketamine, locks of bleached hair, shiny things. Instead, left up to the politicians and protocol officers, they become encased festivals of propriety and quiescence. For every piece of birch bark biting (bark that native Canadians decorated with teeth marks), we have a copy of SaskBusiness Magazine’s “Top 100” companies in Saskatchewan for 2012.

Could anything be more stale? What this time capsule says is, “Behind all this dusty paper, people all over the vast grasslands of Saskatchewan were dusty.” I hope this isn’t true, but in this year of 2112, there will be no evidence to the contrary.

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